Los Angeles Regional Finals Match Defense

[Wes2443]

We (team 2443) played a similar defensive game in our eliminations finals run in San Diego. Funny thing, we initially only played defense because our intake arm broke in QF causing us to not be able to shoot (the reason we got picked). We played the opposite spectrum of the game, defense, great in my opinion, letting us beat alliances we previously thought were unbeatable like 3255's second seed alliance. Our defense mightve been the reason we made it so far and we even took a decisive game in the finals, but in the 3rd match we got penalized for pinning (arguable, but totally the refs judgement). The match was totally even in scores except for foul points and loss by 5 pts.

We found defense to be really hard to play against since vision is already a problem, driving around more defenses which if you don't have an experienced driver brings a second challenge. Probably if we didn't play defense, the finals wouldn't have been as in our favor. I feel if robots only have one definite shooting position they may be more vulnerable to defense. It matters where but a robot could block and force ill advised shots. Then again, you can't not have a shooting position because you can just get pushed around. The perfect shooter will have multiple comfortable shooting positions where they can be flexible and accurate.

Happy for TorBots' alliance for pulling it off in the finals. Unfortunately we couldn't watch it because the stream was down.